Video of the Week: Animating M-PESA

Public-private partnerships are a critical way that USAID is doing business differently and maximizing our impact. USAID is a global leader in building public-private partnerships for development. In the past eleven years, USAID partnered with over 3,000 private sector entities to build over 1,600 alliances leveraging more than $19 billion in combined public and private resources. Across this portfolio, USAID on average leveraged $4 for every $1 of USAID funding.

And it’s more than just dollars leveraged, private sector partners provide expertise, technologies and innovations which, when combined with USAID’s technical expertise and in-country knowledge, can result in high-impact development projects that can be sustained long after public funding ends.

This month we are highlighting innovative public-private partnerships and this 6-minute animation tells the story of how M-PESA, the popular mobile money transfer program, came to be in Kenya. It’s narrated by Michael Joseph, the managing director of mobile money at Vodafone and the program’s founder. The animation was produced as part of a series of online courses designed and delivered by the USAID Mobile Solutions Team, QED, and TechChange, a DC based organization that specializes in online training for international development.

Charley Johnson is a former Presidential Management Fellow with the USAID Mobile Solutions Team. Nick Martin is Founder and President of TechChange.